Who benefits from unlimited webmail storage?

Yahoo Mail, Gmail & Hotmail up the ante

By Juan Carlos Perez | 30 April 07

Webmail providers are motivated to offer vast email storage not only to keep up with competitors, but also because the more data users keeps in their inboxes, the less likely they will be to abandon their accounts, Takahashi said. "It's a way to increase the stickiness of their service," he said. This in turn translates into more ad revenue for them, since webmail services are advertising vehicles, he said. At the same time, the cost of storage is plummeting, so the investment required to provide larger inboxes is a fraction of what it was five years ago.

Laszlo recommends that providers consider increasing the size of messages that can be sent and received, considering that people are sending large video and photo files via email more frequently each day. Currently, most webmail providers cap message sizes at between 10MB and 60MB. However, as pledges of unlimited storage become more common, Laszlo forecasts a lull in webmail improvements.

"The webmail industry goes through cycles where there's a large amount of innovation and things then quiet down for a while, before there's another burst of innovation. We're kind of at the tail end of the innovation spurred by Gmail," said Laszlo.

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Peter Mojica compliance.typepa said: I disagree with the writers last comment that we are in the tail end of innovation its more along the lines that we havent even started - time is going bckwrds where things that the industry wanted 2 do during the hotly debated knowledge mgmt era late 90s - amp the tools were not up 2 par with the thought processes of the time trying to understand tacitampother knowledge from data led 2the deployment of data warehouses then data marts then came the plethora of analytical tools amp custom programmers to find out why blue invokes a better response than red at the check out counter - there was enough scientific jargon to keep buyers on the teetering edge of releasing their budget dollars to attain knowledge that would make them more competitive - communication is knowledge - we r just scratching the surface